War Games

I started playing war games around 1970, when I was eight years old, when I tried to figure out my dad’s “complex” Avalon-Hill “Battle of the Bulge”. In the 15 years that followed, I played dozens of physical board war games, then dozens more computer games. I couldn’t even begin to list them all. Besides, it would be boring.

Like every war gamer, though, I harbored fantasies of designing my own war game. The first game I created, was a PC version of B-17: Queen of the Skies (B17QotS), written in VB6. I also designed a B-24 variant for B17QotS, which was coded into the computer game, or “emulator”, as I refer to it. VB6 code is stored as a plain text file, so it is readable by any editor, from Mac TexEdit to Microsoft Word. I’ve open-sourced the distro, so feel free to hack it, or port it to another platform / language.

I also began design work for a online PHP version of B17QotS, as well as for Avalon-Hill’s classic Midway, but gave them up when I burned out on coding. Feel free to use the design.